Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson
The most interesting thing to me about this book was the ungendered narrator and how Winterson was focused exclusively on the physicality of love - it was overwhelmingly something bodily and corporeal and tangible, and yet the narrator had no body that the reader could pin down in any concrete way.
It was also incredibly off-putting, and it felt to me that though Winterson was making love, all through the novel, something all-consuming, powerful, something in which you drown, like it was also really giving a short shaft to the reality of love - which incorporates the physical, in ways that have been measured, even, which incorporates senses necessarily, but is not purely the body. This, coupled with the hyperbolic, over-poetic nuttiness of the writing, made this really frustrating to read. And the abrupt, ambiguous ending just pissed me the hell off.
I mean, it would have if I hadn't been so ultimately apathetic about the whole experience.
In conclusion: Jeanette Winterson, I admire your passion, but you are a little crazy. Thank you.
The most interesting thing to me about this book was the ungendered narrator and how Winterson was focused exclusively on the physicality of love - it was overwhelmingly something bodily and corporeal and tangible, and yet the narrator had no body that the reader could pin down in any concrete way.
It was also incredibly off-putting, and it felt to me that though Winterson was making love, all through the novel, something all-consuming, powerful, something in which you drown, like it was also really giving a short shaft to the reality of love - which incorporates the physical, in ways that have been measured, even, which incorporates senses necessarily, but is not purely the body. This, coupled with the hyperbolic, over-poetic nuttiness of the writing, made this really frustrating to read. And the abrupt, ambiguous ending just pissed me the hell off.
I mean, it would have if I hadn't been so ultimately apathetic about the whole experience.
In conclusion: Jeanette Winterson, I admire your passion, but you are a little crazy. Thank you.
1 Comments:
I love Jeannette Winterson and I still couldn't get through Written on the Body. Sexing the Cherry is way better, and Gut Symmetries, and Art and Lies. There's still some poetry in em, but fewer O!s and more... guts. Just don't read The Powerbook either.
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